| Summary: | 碩士 === 銘傳大學 === 應用英語碩士在職專班 === 99 === Contemporary obituaries, as the first stab at biography, tell stories of the movers and shakers as well as stories of everyday folks who make their marks in quiet ways but nevertheless add a dash of color to the scenes of history. As such, the obituary in its modern realization opens up, as James Fergusson, the obits editor of the Independent, once put it, “windows of the world that are often closed in journalism” (Wall Street Journal, 1996). In a tidy attractive package, these pages inform, enlighten, as well as entertain and commemorate (Starck, 2006). Certainly it contains the most creative writing in journalism (Johnson, 2006, p. 10). And yet, the ways in which obituaries are composed have not been closely studied. An attempt was thus made to study how newspaper obituaries, as a genre, are composed and organized in systematic ways. In specific, the current study collected and examined thirty obits from two prototypical quality papers: the New York Times from the United States and the Daily Telegraph from the Great Britain. Analyses performed on the sample revealed that newspaper obits, like other genres, depend on certain structures to hold them together. Major elements comprising these obits are attribution, abstract, biography and coda. That said, points of difference were also observed between these two publications in the way they realized these elements, suggesting different orientations were at work: whereas the New York Times obits were news-oriented, the Daily Telegraph obits were more personality-oriented. This was especially the case when it came to how the two dailies of interest differed from one another in crediting source of supply, in listing the circumstance of death and surviving family members, in referring to the subjects, and in using attributive verbs.
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